Background

I was born in Boston. My parents both came as students
from South Korea. My father was the first Korean, I think, to study law in
America. My mother is a sociologist.

Looking back, how did
your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

Totally. My father came at the time when Korea
was controlled by the Syngman Rhee
dictatorship. When it was overthrown, he went back to campaign for
the first democratic government of Korea. When that
government was elected, he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations,
and then minister to the United States. Then his government, the new democratic
government, was overthrown by military coup, and my father refused to serve
the dictatorship and spent the rest of his life in America. That's how I grew
up here. So when I became Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy of the
United States and went back to Korea, it was an important way of bringing
my whole family's life full circle.

What about the influence
of your mother?

My mother is a sociologist. She's an expert on
comparative cultures, and she is one of the leaders of the women's rights
movement in Korea. She is the person who most influenced me on how to understand
human relations. That's become a critical part of what I do, both of as a
lawyer and as a diplomat.

So was there a lot of
talk about politics around the dinner table as you were growing up?

Yes. I have five siblings. My older brother was
a commissioner of public health of Massachusetts.

Oh, I see.

He just recently became a professor at Harvard
Public Health School. I have a number of siblings who are academics. One of
my sisters, Jean Koh Peters, is my colleague at Yale Law School.

So it's fair to say that
your upbringing was a transnational process in itself, actually?

What I was told quite early was, if you're going
to be between two cultures, use your bicultural background as an asset. That
immediately meant that I should be a diplomat, or a lawyer, or an academic.

But the final choice
was law. Why is that? Just because of the influence of your father or the
example he set?

Well, I started out as a physics major, and my
disadvantage was that I was not good in physics. Quite literally, one day
I was going to a physics lab and somebody else was going to a U.S. and East
Asia course, and I turned around and went to that course, and I haven't looked
back.

Did you have any mentors
in law school, or even as an undergraduate at Harvard, who made an impression
on you and further defined the direction that your life was going to take?

In college, two mentors: I had Paul Freund, who
is a professor at Harvard Law School; and Edward Reischauer, who is U.S. Ambassador
to Japan. In law school: Arthur Miller, who is a professor of civil procedure;
and Abram Chayes, who wrote about international legal process. It's really
his ideas of international legal process that I've tried to develop as a transnational
business process. Interestingly, two people whom I didn't study with, Steiner
and Vagts, are now people with whom I coauthored a book on transnational legal
problems and transnational business problems, which are also part of my whole
approach now.